“A haunting” ceramic vessel by yours truly
One of my absolute favorite film genres to consume is HORROR. I mean, the stronger and more sinister the jump scare, the more elusive the true evil, the more creepy the buildup of the scenario and the more white folks meeting a morbidly-arranged end betwixt realms— the more I am engaged. I truly believe horror is the most successful narratorial genre because it’s the one that demonstrates that actions have consequences more than any other western genre. as a Black woman, Horror resonates with me because technically, historically, ancestrally and geographically— it’s all I know. Horror resonates with me.
I imagine this might come as a surprise given the nature of my body of work, but creatively I don’t veer far from the conceptual point of origin when I look up from my paintings and take in a horror film. The very reason my work is a mandate is rooted in horror: consider why our enslaved ancestors could NOT keep a diary. Musing on horror films prods at my creativity and titillates my spiritual imagination. It also enables me to handle the bafflement and irony of what horrifies white folks in cinema fiction versus what horrifies me as a Black American woman.
To be Black American is to live in horror, and we don’t call it horror as often as we should. The nuancing of language has softened our understanding of this vile predicament as descendants of chattel slavery; capitalism gilds the chains and cages it fits onto the mind so that what should disgust you doesn’t seem so bad if you have enough money to furnish your distractions. At the same time a christianized comprehension of horror has made many of us resistant to wngaging a genre whose goal we **think** is to induce “fear” into us, when it’s actually designed to show us elements of human nature that emerge under circumstances of the horrific. Meaning, truest human nature is witnesswd by those who both endure and commit the horrific. Pulling away from the idea of our history and reality as horror and terror is akin to one’s muscle pulling from their bone: it weakens and harms us when we dilute the understanding of what’s been and continues to be committed against us as a people, using nuanced language to cushion the implications for the convictions in which we should be walking. We should be angrier— why aren’t we? I recall the first time I read the word TORTURE to describe chattel slavery (Edward Baptist’s book The Half Has Never Been Told), and feeling the immense RAGE and sadness wash over me at the recognition that chattel slavery was indeed TORTURE. When I sat with the word, I gained a new dimension of the violence in how some things— like white women’s suffrage— are draped with more apt descriptors than others (ie chattel slavery) when this system wants you to pay empathetic attention to one and not the other. History books don’t call chattel slavery torture, sadism— it’s just called “slavery”, and the details of its myriad atrocities are rushed, phlegmatic and sinisterly vague. Most of the language in history books and TV specials supports the racist ideas that Black people feel no pain and are beasts of burden. Calling what our people endured “torture” acknowledges that America intentionally designed a system ON perpetually, savagely brutalizing trafficked human beings with judicial disregard for their humanity…. 400 years of free labor—HORROR— that they actively don’t want us to remember — HORROR— that they actively seek to erase from history books—HORROR— and that they minimise and diminish year after year— HORROR. In the way that naming chattel slavery “torture” reframed its crimes all over for me, calling the entirety of our predicament as Black Americans “HORROR” can support in our testifying to the crimes and the criminals, AND identifying our role in subverting, combatting, and yes, defeating the horror in our mandates, in our generation.
VGB’s new aerogramme “For the Prayer Warriors”
As many of you know, in December of 2025 I began my exploration into pottery, which served as the most appropriate medium to pour the grief I was feeling at the recent grapplings at the truth (and horrors) of being Black American. I often sat still sit at the wheel carrying the pain and heaviness from current events, recent experiences, and personal revelations of what it means to be a Black American woman. I condensed my grief in an affirmative resolution and mandate into which I inscribe my clay works, and most recently featured on the new aerogramme letter set “For the Prayer Warriors”:
“A haunting. A happening. A herald.
An homage. An honor. Holy.”
The s a call and response to the ancestors I venerate and the assignment I’ve accepted. This affirmation embodies what it means to live in call and response to the ancestral [ex-vangelical] understanding of being the triumphant protagonist in the horror narrative that is Blackness.
It’s my renouncing fear as the basis of horror and instead recognising that accepting my place as a witness is me doing my part in defeating the monsters at work around me/us/we. The affirmation is also rooted in my existence being a threat to whiteness because I am the embodiment of the memories that haunt them of all they have committed. I can conjure and commune with holy ghosts who will tell me what diabolical tortures these white folks have delighted in relaying, and can receive Divine revelations that inform me in the practices of scale-balancing. Which brings me to my next point: The most glorious moment in every horror story is when the protagonist learns what it will take to kill the monsters, how to defeat the evil… We must remember that the HORROR of whiteness is the day that we as a people learn to disarm and crush it. The discombobulation of racism, the bewilderment with their audacity, the numbing of ourselves to not contort with the rage we feel are all implementations of horror to prevent us from emerging as the conquerors over their evils. The work we commit ourselves to doing as individuals prepares us to be the interruption, the insurgence and destroyers of their horrors, terrors, spells and dark magic. As Langston Hughes so plainly put it, “beware the day [the Negroes] change their mind.” And that day will come.
There is power in naming a thing what it is, and calling our history and present HORROR is a powerful means of providing us with navigational tools, wisdom and warfare equipment to maneuver the coordination of strategized barbarism, terror and horror that frames the Black American existence. It’s also a way by which we can identify our role in Ourstory. Herald? Haunting? Happening? Holy.
Prologue: Why Horror Matters.
As we all know, it takes the one who’s been sick to be familiar with modalities of healing. With this understanding it is inarguable that Black americans are uniquely and Divinely positioned in history and the generations to tap into our vast ancestral memory, confront and defeat the devilish horrors of western capitalist white nationalist violence that DEFINES global society and is hinged on antiBlackness. When we give ourselves to studying horrors we have endured we realise we need not fear ANY evil— ancestors are with us. AntiBlackness is a horror story, and when we ask why it is we are so deeply hated we need only look at the supernatural miracles of our resilience and every means our endurance has proven that whites and all who wish to be possessed by their spirits of violence are devils. We have died and resurrected like the messiahs that we are… lived despised, rejected, and deeply acquainted with horror and sorrow so deep it’s unfathomable how any of us were left to see Emancipation. Yet here we remain, witness testimony embedded in our marrow as the ultimate enemy of the Confederate agenda of white supremacy. The only enemy of any supernatural savior is a devil, and every Black woman who desires to take their place as a heroine must realise that acquaintance with the ways of horror helps us see and address violent systems as sinister, and thus by name and with appropriate weaponry. When we comprehend that we exist as the nemisis to horror through our survival, witness testimony and memory alone, we are able to preserve, prepare and prophecy to the generations accordingly. Because culturally, you cannot prepare a generation of powerful witnesses who can defeat evil if you refuse to apprehend what horror truly means to, in, and around you, past, present to future. If you call that which is horror “normal life” you will live in the vein of that belief and thus befriend those who are your enemies. You cannot be afraid of that which mandates your fear to force you into submission and surrender of your birthright. Horror is the willful conjuring and orchestrating of evil that is the truth of anyone/entity’s character. You can’t understand urgency if you lack clarity on what is the horrific, and what is the conduct you must apprehend to endure and defeat it. To address evil as horror is to empower yourself with staring an enemy in the eye and calling it by name, establishing that you cannot be gaslit, tricked or fooled from its strategies of cruelty done in the darkness. Those who desire to live in a world where horrors raging against them are not defined are easy to control, manipulate and coerce into compliance to nefarious terrors on the oppressor’s side, masquerading as channels of “success” and yes, masking as utopic ideas. When we study Black history we are studying horror, and understanding our history as horror helps us to situate ourselves in the canon of our ancestral mandates while inoculating ourselves from lies of westernism. If you are still thinking The Exorcist, Freddy and Jason, I need you to come back to me.
Hear me out: Horror and terror are accomplished by their appearance of being omnipotent, omniscient, and immortal— this element of the pending DOOM (another useful phrase to describe feelings within Blackness) is what creates the scare/fear factor. Who’s there? What’s outside? What will it/they do? Will I be able to escape? The VERY SAME questions asked of those in a horror narrative are the SAME questions Black folks have asked ourselves in the paralell universe/ horrific underbelly of the USA, apart from whites+immigrants. It is we who have had our nervous systems fraught with not knowing if a child will be sold in the morning or our spouse peeled from us on the afternoon’s auction block. It is WE who have lost the memory of homeland. It is WE who have been forcibly gathered and made to watch floggings, maimings, and raping of Black men who dared defy the terms of enslavement. It is WE who inately understand the fright of the embodiment of night-terrors—the KKK— with having a random act such as standing on the same sidewalk as a white person bringing on the sentence of a public whipping or lynching. It is WE who know the devils can smile and laugh and enjoy a Sunday lunch under a Black body swinging from a tree, smoldering and charred from being burned alive as they hung. Sound horrific? It is we who know what it is to build towns and mind our business only for our existence to bring about the barbarism and savagery of whites. Who knows horror better than Black americans? I could go on forever. One of the greatest, more modern horrors we observe is learning that an ally has been possessed with the demon you are trying to defeat, and this is what flanks Black Americans on every side: that we have no one but ourselves, and even within that all skinfolk are not kinfolk: we still have Black republican conservatives who’ve been possessed by the entities of white violence and are operating out of their minds to achieve the aims and goals of white military industrialism while in a Black body. Horror. Enduring all we have endured without reparations or an apology while being expected to be upstanding citizens and actively slandered by American media? HORRORRRRRRR! Political prisoners rotting in solitary confinement for free speech? HORROR. Being assassinated because the truth you tell would upset the unholy “order” of whiteness? HORROR.
It is Black Americans who have had to create secret codes in songs and hymns and quilts; contort our bodies to hide in vents, closets, attics, boxes and under floorboards from slave-catchers sanctioned to maim us upon apprehension. WE whose blood gave the Atlantic’s sharks a route to swim and whose flight from enslavers’ dogs named an American food “hush puppy”— HORROR. Who knows horror better than Black americans?— than a Black woman?? because it is WE who could be forcefully impregnated, hired out as wet nurses to other white women, told to ration our breast milk so that the enslaver’s white child could feed; forced to continue in the fields after labor and childbirth minutes before… HORROR. And so it is to our benefit to cease minimising our plight with exonerating language and instead reconcile with the reality we embody so we can see these devils as what they are.
Many have normalized or choose to NOT defeat horrors of western society. They have allied with our oppressors in acts of wilful ignorance that perpetuate and sanction horrors against us—why?. Firstly, because the system of horror benefits them (looking at whites, asian and hispanic immigrants— some African immigrants, too). Secondly, in a culture that worships at the altar of amnesia, injustice thrives, and also lines pockets, ie private prisons. A similar amnesia called “that’s the past” is a horror that weaponises any act of remembering as contentious. And still others refuse to defeat anything they could be ancestrally related and perhaps in the will of inheritance that promises them privilege and power in exchange for silence. The politics of the gun have caused many to worship in churches under penalty of being considered an enemy of the State.
But Black folks’ conscience and familiarity with EVIL, terror and horror are simultaneously our inherited, indefatigable strength in crushing this pandora’s box of horrors in america. We have endured magnanimous centuries of coordinated terror, sadism, tortures, atrocities, and barbarism. And its taken generations of OUR griots, astronomers, root workers, authors, and seers to preserve recipes, folklores, cures, prayers, declarations, books and indictments so that today in this era we can collectivise and synthesise their works, narratives and conclusions to see how we might completely demolish the confederacy of terror, horror and brutality that have defined the Black predicament since we first were trafficked to these shores. To face the horror we must cease being afraid and apprehend the power of what’s been placed in our history—in our marrow.
We live in a duality of existence as both Black and American— the Duboisian “double-consciousness”. Our culture is the fabric of this nation’s history and yet we will never be benefactors of it’s promulgated “dream”— a position that presents us with the opportunity to expose devils as many Black authors, musicians and diarists before us have done. Countless Black American historical figures lent their gifts to describing and indicting the dynamics of terror and HORROR that plagued everyday Black life. In their work, we can discern our mandate. Ida B. Wells’ booklet spared no language in calling lynching culture a “Southern horrors” in her book of that same title. In her unflinching descriptions of mob-led, extrajudicial public executions, she narrates an america few today still wish to believe existed and still exists. It is not the backside as so many call the horrors of white violence in Black life, but the FACE of this diabolical republic.
“[The South’s] white citizens are wedded to any method however revolting, any measure however extreme, for the subjugation of the young manhood race. They have cheated him out of his ballot, deprived him of civil rights or redress therefor[e] in the civil courts, robbed him of the fruits of his labor, and are still murdering burning, and lynching him.” - Southern Horrors, p. 66
Simultaneously, WPA narratives are nothing but a series of real life horror stories recounted by survivors of horror both of slavery and the horrific arrangement of sharecropping. Seeing these narratives as nothing less is erasure and antiBlack, proving the extent to which the western mind mandates savage brutality against us to furnish everyone else with thr comforts of capitalism. The horror is that at one point we Black folks were the capital. We have vocalized our plight in the UN (“We Charge Genocide!”) and in concert halls, chiming the duality of our greatness and the horror in which we live on a day to day basis. The Blues as a genre was another vehicle for us to belt out our testimony+indictment of the oppression that pervades Black life. The pride we have in our Blackness has always been in the recognition of the inhumane tortures we endure as a people in America. Consider the lyrics to James Brown’s “Black and Proud”:
“I've worked on jobs with my feet and my hands
But all the work I did was for the other man
And now we demands a chance
To do things for ourselves
We're tired of beating our heads against the wall
And working for someone else
…
Say it loud (I'm Black and I'm proud)
Say it louder (I'm Black and I'm proud)
Now we demand a chance to do things for ourselves
We're tired of beating our heads against the wall
And working for someone else
Look here, there's one thing more I got to say right here
Now, we're people, we like the birds and the bees
And we'd rather die on our feet than keep living on our knees”. — James Brown, 1968
Sam Cooke succinctly poeticised the fight or flight that engulfs the Black body when he cried “ I was born by the river in a little tent/ and just like the river I’ve been running ever since.” And when Lady Billie Holiday defied record labels and venue prohibitions and hauntingly belted the lyrics “Southern trees bear a strange fruit/ Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/ Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze/ Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees/ Pastoral scene of the gallant South/ The bulgin' eyes and the twisted mouth/ Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh/ Then the sudden smell of burnin' flesh”— she was courageously singing one a lyric of horror. And when Nina Simone said “Mississippi, Goddamn!” she outlined her titular indictment in every soulful note, “Hound dogs on my trail/ School children sitting in jail/ Black cat cross my path/ I think every day's gonna be my last/ Lord have mercy on this land of mine/ We all gonna get it in due time/ I don't belong here/ I don't belong there I've even stopped believing in prayer"…”. And when Black protest music was at its zenith, it was Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” that gave us a plight to the horrors of the time “Picket lines/ and picket signs/ don’t punish me with brutality”
Western media and culture have done their best to banalise supernatural tools that were bequeathed to us for waymaking, breaking, calling and banishing into objects for everyday consumption. They have contorted the Black American existence into a global manufacturer producing fashion trends and “GenZ slang” (Ebonics). In an act of generational irreplicable horror, the’ve engineered their atrocity against Blackness into a trend-manfacturing machine; they’ve weaponised others against us with the wicked, heinous poison gas of antiBlackness. They’ve desecrated graves, lynched bodies in the cover of night and in the audacity of daylight—with impunity— and have made profits by slandering our name—a defamation that’s become their generational wealth AND created pervasive stigma that’s shattered all empathy to our plight on a global scale.
act i: Pondering The Horror
Currently nearly 1million Black women have been displaced from the workforce and if the media does cover this evil plot against us, it does so with nuanced language similar to how one speaks on a natural disaster: as if it’s just “happened”. One of the most horrific elements to being Black in America is being treated as if our existence came from the nuance of “happen” instead of the coordinated intentional economies of “committed”. As soon as Emancipation cleared our people were slandered in Jim Crow’s branch of propaganda: the media campaign that called us lazy and hypersexualized. Their newspapers called us problematic and audaciously ASKED HOW and pondered WHY we were so— eliminating the atrocity, the horrors of chattel slavery from their narrative and isolating Black peoples to capricious consequences of random, sidereal and irresponsible happenstance. As immigrants were flooded into the newly-industrialising United States to be the workforce white America wanted to pay, Black people were rendered less than second class citizens on the land that we involuntarily built with our stolen bodies. A horror. A terror. And it never went away. Today to be in the workplace as a Black person, especially a Black woman, means to understand navigating the same maligning atmosphere begun in the confederate states and in the Jim Crow era. The navigation of hostile environments goes hand in hand with employment, and the design is intentional— but have we called it terror, torture, sadism, and horror? Let’s. Working with immigrants who’ve been weaponised by antiBlack propaganda and the model minority idealogy that gives them a false bravado and a “leg up” in your presence is a psychological warfare which few of us have been taught to confront and defeat. The attack is coordinated, invisible, loudly silent and hinging on our ahistorical existence, illiteracy and spiritual castration for its success. Part of taking your spiritual authority is naming a thing what it is. And so today we remember chattel slavery, Jim Crow, the summer of 1919, the culture of lynchings, medical experimentations on Black bodies founding bigPharma; the debilitizations of assassinating Black leaders, infiltrating Black Liberation organizations, flooding our neighbourhoods with crack cocaine, mass incarcerating Black men, then still asking “WHYYYYY are Black people so…[insert negative steretype]…”
…The HORROR. The coordinated, intentional DESIGN of HORROR and TERROR.
In 1915, the film Birth of a Nation single-handedly caused the resurgence of the KKK. The film used slanderous caricatures of Black people and the storyline of Black men raping a white woman to install and install an updated software of an irreversible mindset of modern hatred of and bloodlust for Black people. The film gave whites an alibi for their envy of Black folks miraculously recovering from slavery and becoming prosperous: the rumour of the sexual violation of the “pure” white woman. But I want to talk not about the klan or about the film: I want to discuss evidence of things unseen. Because for the past year or so I’ve been making notes on my everyday experiences with racism in its must subtle packaging and I’ve come to realise how horrific it is to live in this skin with the hope, zeal and muster of ancestral resilience and BRILLIANCE while my life and livelihood can be negatively impacted by those who have chosen to believe a multigenerational RUMOR. A rumour has been disseminated about us, teastained woman. A rumour that’s altered brain chemistry of whites and those who desire to be white (every other POC in america—fight ya momma). A rumour whose goal has been to prevent us from simple attainment of human rights because of what’s been believed about us so as to absolve whites of their crimes against our humanity. The rumour that says you have no culture, that severs you from the atrocity of the Middle Passage that trafficked your ancestors here and the strategic disenfranchisement that cost generations their just wages and reparations. The rumour that broke backs, wore out ankles and caused still unnamed autoimmune diseases. The rumour that formed a web of weapons against us that framed us for immorality, violence, sexual perversions and grotesqueness that originated from whites. The rumour that we battle when we walk into the room and are expected to represent our entire culture. The rumour that prevented Black women from wearing our natural hair on the job for decades. The rumor—the ghost. And this rumor, this slanderous ghost worshipped by whites to furnish their hate is a thing of horror.
There is no greater American Horror Story than that of how Black Americans are treated. And for centuries we have lived in a seldomly-interrupted inversion where we pray and wait and love our enemies. Those who have sought to undo this vile hacking of ourselves have been assassinated. Their words have named the horror and have indicted this system: that is, giving us clear language that identifies the invisible actors working against us and equipping us with blueprints and strategies for us to both individually and collectively defeat the pernicious system of white violence.
act ii: Combatting The Horror
If you ask the average Black woman to watch a horror movie she will tell you she doesnt like horror or doesnt want to “open herself up/expose herself to” the contents of a horror flick. Horror in general is addressed as a living, plotting entity that should not be engaged for reasons seldom itemized, explained. There’s usually a flinching response that’s followed by a defensive set of reasons as to why we don’t touch horror, and they usually have to do with not wanting to be scared on purpose. And while I don’t watch EVERY horror movie out there, horror has proven to be a lens for me to understand and name the plight of Blackness.
Salient elements of the horror genre include demons, demonic possession, haunted environments; supernatural creatures such as werewolves, ghosts and vampires; resurrection/undead beings, fantastical violence, spell-casting or magical realism. Whether she is a christian or not, the average Black woman’s avoidance of horror is steeped in having a christianized mind, with the christianized understanding that “THE” devil is at work and always at war with, around and seeking to enter you—even through a horror film. Christians believe in spiritual warfare that says we wrestle “NOT against flesh and blood” but instead against the unseen demonic realm at work to sabotage and blockade our progress along life’s journey. And yet when I ponder the mechanism of christianity in exonerating and promising my people’s MORTAL enemies with heaven while also rewarding them with the cloak of white privilege, I see horror at work.
As an avid horror consumer, deconstructing exvangelical, hoodoo studier AND diarist it’s incumbent upon me to unshackle any Black woman’s mind from the concept that a single devil in the unseen realm is at work against us. Black women, we ABSOLUTELY DO WRESTLE AGAINST FLESH AND BLOOD. Unseen powers did not strategise the bloody economies of cotton, tobacco, sugar and indigo; author the Georgia Black Codes, create the convict leasing system, turn whole areas of the South into breeding grounds for the enslaved; buck break Black men, write the Casual Killing Laws, create whole events out of lynching Black people, destroy Black towns/districts, create the dynamic of the Black domestic worker in the 40s-60s, distribute drugs into Black neighbourhoods, establish a dominant narrative of antiBlackness across media and airwaves, ETCETERA. It was NOT the unseen. It was and has always been those who have availed themselves to a pernicious imagination to intentionally commit crimes against a people with no country and have impunity all along. Horror against Black Americans has always been a mandate for whiteness and others to have a preoccupation and purpose on stolen land. Without antiBlackness and its adjacent horrors, whiteness has to confront its maladies, psychosis and craving for violence (physical to economical) in order to justify their existence. The truth is that to live by whiteness is to pledge allegiance to horror, and to live as a Black american is to live IN horror.
Perhaps our avoidance of horror in film is because our nervous system cannot delineate fact from fiction when we watch a horror movie. Returning to christianity (because christianity is the belief system that was thrust upon us during chattel slavery and simultaneously gave whites justification in committing heinous terrorism against us), I would like to encourage us to view both its beliefs and whiteness as demons that can and have possessed us. The latter is no new concept. Dr. Amos Wilson shared how under white supremacy Black people are out of our minds. He iterates time and again that the maladies within our personalities as a people cause us to be weaponised against one another and useful to be oppressed by and a convenience to white supremacy.
I don’t think we have settled on how violent and horrific christianity is, preoccupying Black people with loving our enemies and praying FOR our oppressors instead of identifying injustice and CURSING those who have strategised and benefitted from our being possessed with the holy ghost. The horror of praying FOR your enemy who gets to hang your son from a tree and then comfort yourself with the narrative with “one day they’ll get theirs” is DIABOLICAL. The idea that we use our commanding words to skip over those causing harm against us, to embrace being spiritually disarmed IS horror in action. Because not only do we witness injustice we are possessed with the spirit that tells us that revenge is what’s wrong. That scale-balancing is satanic. That using our Divine words and ancestral memory of these demonic skin-walkers amongst us is not our place. BLACK WOMAN. The silence has killed us slowly. Watching and waiting has been our weathering, disease and demise. Generation after generation telling us to wait for sweet Jesus and the future judgement day by suppressing our indictments is the horror we think we fear. Is the terror in which we already live.
Horror thrives in being unnamed, unknown and not perceived; you know it’s there, but you don’t know when it will strike. In movies and in real life, so long as the main characters are unwilling to act against the horror, it moves from the unseen realm and snatches lives in reality. Is this not what we ALREADY endure as a people? We exist with the vampires who need our blood to survive (HeLa cells!); with the werewolves and warlocks who are pastors, doctors and sheriffs but change into their monstrous forms under cover of night; with the ghosts of the confederacy being conjured and consulted at altars with the blood of Black children spilled atop of them so as to inform the new generation of whites on how to conduct themselves. The ghosts who keep the rumour fuelled and teach the witches of the confederacy how to create curricula that erases Black history and nuance language of violence against Black folks. We know what we’re dealing with and it is HORROR that teaches us to name it. Call it horror. Call it terror. And learn the language of indictment and the conduct that tells you to use your uttered WORDS to sanction the balancing of the scales.
Every horror movie has the moment where the main character learns how to fight back. As I servey the culture I see many Black women renouncing Christianity and returning to Hoodoo and other vernacular spiritualities that named white violence and cursed the oppressors. There is no defeating the horrific, the terror without arriving to the place where you stop believing you are fighting innocent, unyielded beings. You must get to the place where you understand you are at war with intentional design, intentional strategy, coordinated efforts. There are no “good ones”. They all benefit from a multigenerational COVENANT that deems your torture, maiming, disenfranchisement and lynching as the justifiable cost to their comfort. So you need to fight with the strongest thing in your arsenal: memory, testimony and declaration. Demons love a christianized mind that gives their enemies the benefit of the doubt. That pause can cost you, Black woman. You must learn to be relentless and RUTHLESS with your words. In your quiet, do not perpetuate the will of whiteness by exonerating them. Do not bless those who curse you in ANY way. Ask the Creator to expose any way you do so; any way you call monsters friends; any way you leave the door cracked open for the boogey men of their world to terrorise you. Believe that there is a work being formed against you in the unseen realm but that your work is also in both the seen and unseen realm. Believe in the conspiracy against your LIFE. Speak that the horrors at work around you are to be exposed and as you are proficient in identifying the ghoul (human flesh-eaters who can walk amongst humans), the hypnosis spells (why do you feel compelled to be nice to your evil manager or say hi to that white neighbour? That’s a SPELL at work, beloved),
act iii: Reclaiming Our Tools
My encouragement to you is to not be christianized out of the tools left to you for your participation in identifying and defeating the horrors flanking us each day as Black people. The tools are often found in the very thing the christian church told us to stop doing, especially in recent years since the Black church has become so far removed from its root worker origins. When Alice Walker learned of the historical heroine Zora Neal Hurston one of the earliest pieces of Husrson’s research Walker shared was the “Justice Prayer” Hurston had collected I her field work. Today such a “prayer” would never be found in a christian church, where the synthesis of being wronged and returning the reverberation of its motive back to sender has been demonised as “getting in God’s way”…. You are a vessel for justice, Black woman. Just as whites and their flunkies are vessels for the demonic attack of antiBlackness YOU are the vessel of the counteraction through obeying the ancestral memory that tells you to balance the scales by refusing to agree with or sit in demonic meekness/quiet as they benefit from your dehumanisation. You must learn to love the laws of violence in this way. Learn to anticipate and take JOY in seeing your enemy ravaged as a result of enacting terror against you. So often the very thing we have normalised and adjusted our lives to enduring is the very horror that we are being quickened to identified and defeat as an initiation to defeating greater horrors. Who told you to sit in bewilderment and brutalise your soul with ruinations of their evils against you. What must be done? May your tongue be delivered from showing mercy to those who wish and enact harm against you with a smile. That is horror.
Haiti gave us a term for slavery with the folklore of the “zumbi” from which we get today’s more popularised “zombie”: without souls, and enslaved to create profits for their captors for eternity— no rest in death... aka enslavement. As we know about US chattel slavery, even in death our bodies were prevented from rest: enslavers often gave instructions for their “property” to be buried near them to continue to serve them in the afterlife; and later, grave-robbers stole our peoples’ bodies from graves for use as cadavers in American universities. The whole life of an enslaved person was useful to whites, like the Haitian zombie. In my mother’s area of the Caribbean (Virgin Islands), Moko-Jumbies are folkloric figures who were vigilant protectors of Africa’s stolen peoples….Central Africa’s word “moko” means “healer” and the word “jumbie” in the Caribbean describes a spirit being— in this case, a TALL being whose height was meant to intimidate the evil powers behind slavery. Portrayed in carnival on TALL stilts, Moko Jumbies were fabled to have used their long legs to pursue slave ships, wading through the Atlantic Ocean as a witnessing presence against the atrocities and horrors of chattel slaevery in the islands. You know, Christianity leaves Black folks without hope, and you will find that along the deconstructing journey you learn how much HOPE, healing and warfare equipment is awaiting you in the very narratives christians told us to jettison, cast down, and put away in the name of that demon Jesus. In Maryland, the spirit of Big Liz is still believed to be able to be conjured. Big Liz was an enslaved woman whose strength intimidated her enslaver. In response to witnessing her near-supernatural strength, her enslaver brought her to a swamp and told her to dig a huge hole. When she completed the task the enslaver beheaded Liz and dumped her body in that wetland grave she’d dug—however: Big Liz’s spirit returned and she killed that man. This reminds me of the prayer Harriet Tubman (who was also from MD) prayed: first that her enslaver would get sick, then that he’d sell her to a “kinder” enslaver, and then finally Tumban prayed the prayer that needed to be prayed “Father, KILL THAT MAN” and her enslaver DIED. Being a conduit of death is no small thing, but if there’s anything we know is it’s a life for a life. Chattel slavery was an act of mass serial killing and it’s always been a life for a life. Christianity framed such dynamic as witchcraft and told us that the power of life and death is in the tongue—and to only speak life. But Black woman there ar times when you must speak death, and I don’t say this lightly. When someone’s actions have come for your LIFE, it’s a life for a life, even if you never died. Is Big Liz such a Holy Ghost who must be conjured? In my opinion, YES.
What I appreciate about the folklore and spiritual traditions of our people is that they give specific names and circumstances to what christianity generalises as “THE devil”. It’s a partial truth that again disarms us as a supernatural people whose survival has NOT been because of a Christian god. In many of our ancestrally-led spiritual practices we are naming entities that originate under specific circumstances [of injustice/evil] and have specific means by which they can be dealt. For instance, haints are legendary as evil spirican be warded off by painting porches, doors, walls, ceilings etc. with “haint blue” and/or by dressing tree branches with blue bottles to capture said spirits. There are some folkloric spirit legends that I wonder were intended to protect Black children by causing them to be hyper-vigilant of the dangers that flank them through the horrors of the American South, such as the Gullah/Geechee Plat-Eye, which is fabled to await in the woods to terrify Black children. However, from my research Plat-Eyes are also the spirits of those unjustly killed, tethered to the site where the unjust killing took place— so I also beg the question: do Plat-Eyes pursue children because children are the ones with the ability to see them and can relay their testimony to the living? The same goes for my understanding of haints: I grew up learning that haints are the ghosts of those Black folks who were killed unjustly and who “haunted” you to get your attention to act in vengeance on their behalf. hmm.
Black woman, what is a horror to the horrendous should be a comfort to us. And this is why I want to dispel the idea that horror is anything short of a lens through which we Black women can understand what terrifies the oppressor and the tools we should search for in our ancestral memories to defeat these monsters at work in our society. I want to remind you that in the narrative of our horror, there is the testimony indictment, and in the indictment is the ability to defeat the array of monsters. Teastained woman, you cannot fear horror— we don’t know life without it. You must study the tools left to you from those who endured and named it so you can arise and cast down the monsters— and so that you can dream up the worlds that will exist in the Black Future after the horror has been defeated.
“Black people have always been epic/ and we have always overcome
…I will give you a mission greater than your adversity/
…I will give you POWER!
I will give you a destiny.
I ask only that you be the great and glorious people you were meant to be
the illuminated children of the sun.
I ask that you take responsibility…
If you would reclaim your legacies you must stand on higher ground.”
-Ricky “Rickydoc” Flowers
A Very Crude citation list:
James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time
Dr. Wilson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEyqbPXp6Ng
plats and boo-hags: https://blac.media/culture/candyman-candyman-candyman-and-other-black-folk-horrors
moko jumbies https://riverscoaching.co.uk/blog/moko-jumbies-lessons-in-liberation-from-a-beloved-protector/
